The Risk it Took
by dress without sleeves
Summary: The young women of Harry Potter had to grow up someday.
1. Ginny

The Risk it Took

_For Ally_

_To prove that brothers never stop loving you._

**Ginny**

_Then the time came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. – Anaus Nin_

She was angry at first, and that didn't surprise anyone.

She was furious, for no reason and for every reason – she hated that the garden still bloomed, and she hated when a flower died. She hated the food she ate but threw tantrums when she was hungry. She hated the captivity of her home but even more the wide and empty space of the outdoors.

Everything was wrong, wrong, wrong. Smiles were infuriating and frowns depressed her; photographs made her bitter, and yet without them she felt as though she had no past. Letters made her feel inferior, but no mail at all proved a point she didn't know she was making.

She hated to talk. Silence was oppressing.

Sometimes she couldn't believe that he had left her. Sometimes it felt like she was ten-years-old again. She was _scared _for him. She _missed _him, so much that sometimes it hurt just to _think_ about it, because he was off with Harry and Hermione and she was just his _stupid_ little sister, stuck at home as always.

And it made her so _angry._

It was only when she found her mother's heart that everything spun out of control. It was small, and wooden, and when the Weasley matriarch laid eyes on it, her face paled and she cried so hard that there were no tears. _Gideon made it for me,_ Molly Weasley explained to her daughter, wiping at her dry eyes. _He said that it was a little piece of him to carry around with me._

She had pressed the necklace into Ginny's hands and smiled, the expression growing all the way up to her eyes. _You have it. A brother's love is a brother's love._

And then Ron's face came into her mind, and everything collided. Her hate and her love. But a funny thing happened. Instead of an explosion, it all melted into one and formed a funny kind of patched salvation for her. A sort of … cracked broom one thousand feet above the ground.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Ginny did not feel afraid. Instead she grabbed hold, fastened the heart – _a brother's love is a brother's love –_ around her neck, and allowed the broom to carry her higher, and higher, and higher into the perfect sky.


	2. Hermione

The Risk it Took

**Hermione**

_For me_

_To prove a point._

Of all the sins in all the world, hers was the worst.

It wasn't that she didn't _realize_ she was slipping away. On the contrary, she met her loss with open arms. It seemed a welcome alternative to the sneers and twittering laughter of the other girls; she had read that you were supposed to love yourself for what you were – but Hermione knew better than anyone that most books, even factual ones, were fiction.

That was fine. She'd gotten good at discerning the cold truth from the embellishments. For example, "Love Yourself," really just meant, "Love the You that everyone else wants."

She wasn't popular enough for an "everyone" but not boring enough to be alone, so she instead embraced the Hermione that Ron and Harry expected. It was a simple Hermione, and an easy one to fall into pattern with; and if she lost a little bit of her fire and her humor, well, at least she still had the important things, like moral fiber and intelligence.

Hermione had learned at a young age that it's not the _whole_ person people want to enjoy, only the perfect pieces and the unsurprising. No one wanted to see the funny side of the class bookworm – she was expected to get straight A's, carry around heavy books with impressive titles, and eat properly, with her fork in the right hand and her mouth closed when she chewed. She had always been taught to do what was expected of her, and she was highly practiced in obedience.

It was soon that she realized she wasn't working quite so hard at it anymore, and that it came much more easily to bite her tongue and deaden the fire inside. It didn't seem tragic; instead, she was relieved to find her workload lifted. She felt self-satisfied, and half-wanted to sneer at the other girls, "You see? _You're_ still pretending. _I'm_ better at this than you. _I_ don't have to work anymore."

But that was out of character, and Hermione was nothing if not dedicated.

If sometimes she wanted to get tipsy and cheer at Quidditch games that she didn't really care that much about – it was just the _excitement_, the adrenaline rush to her brain – well, that was to be expected. No one was perfect, of course, not even her, and she allowed herself the occasional ache for a trashy romance novel or an extra cupcake at dinner.

Some people chose the wrong character, the imperfect, _unanticipated_ character, and that always led them down the wrong path. Hermione was sorry for Ginny Weasley, for her mistake of longing for that which does not exist: someone to see past the pretense to the _real person_ – if there is such a thing – inside, and to love that person. Ron's little sister simply enforced what Hermione already knew: it was not the surprise that people enjoyed, it was the everyday. The predictable.

Sometimes she had to wonder at what character Harry was playing. She could never seem to tell. Once, she thought that perhaps he was a hero – but he wasn't, really, or if that was his intention he was doing a terrible job. Then she thought perhaps a rebel, but that didn't suit either. He was a mystery to her, and she was desperate to ask, _Who _are_ you?_ But she never really could.

Ron was simple; he was the lovable oaf, and the three of them would have been perfect if Harry could just cooperate. He was a stain on her perfection, and there was simply nothing she could do to resolve it.

Her sin was not in the loss; it was in the losing. Her sin was that she watched herself leave, even opened the door for her and waved a cheery goodbye. Somewhere in the mess of everything, Hermione was gone, replaced by a pale and shadowy replica.

It was Ginny who noticed, and so it was Ginny she blamed when the old Hermione came home. They were visiting on Christmas – Ron had missed his family, and Harry was glad for the rest – and Ginny, her hand curled around a small wooden heart, cocked her head to the side and wondered aloud, _Why don't you ever let anyone see you, Hermione?_

She had stared, shaken that anyone had seen through her carefully constructed shell. She had pretended not to know what Ginny was talking about, as though this "fake Hermione" was some sort of joke. Ginny had shrugged, willing to let it go, but had slipped in the last word: _It's not the bookworm that Ron loves, you know. It's the bookworm that's keeping him away._

That was stupid, Hermione knew, because she had been so careful not to show Ron any _other_ side of her. Of _course_ it was the bookworm that he was attracted to; it was the only Hermione he knew. There was simply no way that he would love any other side of her.

But she knew. There were cracks in her statue. Holes the size of craters. They had come at moments when there was no _choice _but to let go; moments when Ron was in danger, or Harry was in danger, or the fate of the world lay in her hands. She had overlooked them before, turned a blind eye because she didn't want to believe it. And so the old Hermione came crawling back, knocking at the door and smiling at her second chance.

Christmas passed. New Years passed. Her birthday passed, and the old Hermione was creeping back towards the exit, defeated. But still, Ginny's words rang in her head: _it's the bookworm that's keeping him away._

It had never occurred to her that she, _Hermione,_ may have chosen the wrong path. That the position of bookworm she had assumed _wasn't_ the perfect guise. Was she just as misguided as Ginny had been, all those years ago? Was she – _could_ she have made her first mistake all the way in the beginning?

These were the questions that the old Hermione loved to be asked. She loved to answer them, and the bookworm was – for the first time – second-guessing herself.

She searched her books; they gave her no answers. Deserting her not for the first time, and not for the last.

She was quiet, thoughtful. Harry didn't notice – he was consumed by his decision to defeat Voldemort, the hero at last. Now it was not _he_ that would ruin her; she had no one to blame but herself.

She became sloppy, and sometimes she would do careless things, like snorting when she laughed too hard or eating too much. Ron seemed to find these things amusing, but not surprising. He seemed to . . . _enjoy_ her mistakes.

_It's the bookworm that's keeping him away._

Hermione felt herself slipping. It was the one thing she had always been sure of, and now that ground was shaky. It made her irritable and hot-headed and she woke up in the middle of April to find that she was back where she'd started, fighting to hold her tongue and forcing herself to get through boring books and secretly wanting danger and excitement, like Ron's lips on hers and his tongue in her mouth.

_I like this . . . new you,_ he said to her one day, draping an arm around her shoulder as they walked. _I always knew there was more to you than just a bookworm._

She shivered and clutched her book to her and wanted to go home. She didn't like this place, where everyone could see _her_, the imperfect Hermione, the unex_pected_ Hermione, the Hermione that no one _really_ wanted to know. Did they?

He kissed her underneath a pale half-moon, and she let him. His hands were cold and she let her fire burn to warm them both. He held her, and smiled at her, his warm honey eyes spilling sunlight into her hair, and whispered, _Don't ever change, Hermione, don't ever hide again._

She was nothing if not obedient, and Hermione let her statue collapse to the ground around her feet, where it lingered for only a moment before disappearing into the cold, cold earth.

The fire burned.


	3. Luna

**Luna**

_For Chelsea_

_Who sees the world the way that Luna does._

For a long time, everything had been so … vivid. The water was the deepest, brightest, most startling blue imaginable, and the breathtaking green of grass made her hesitant to even walk on it. Even the darkness that came upon her was the deepest of black and most frigid of cold. Everything was its utmost beautiful – she had been sure that this was the world.

Then, things went off color. It was duller, somehow. As though she was wearing dirty glasses. It all seemed so … plain. She wasn't entirely sure why she ever thought this earth was something miraculous and unique; it was all the same, every corner and every mother in every coffin.

Sometimes she had nightmares, and her father would tuck her in and wrap his arms around her and whisper, _You're safe now._

She realized then that it was not the _world_ that had faded. It was _her._ She was duller, grayer, than she'd ever been. It was on the inside, not the perfect pink of her flesh. She asked her father if one could turn inside out, so that even though she would be dull on the outside, her insides would glow again.

He'd smiled at her, but it didn't even reach his cheekbones. _Oh, Luna, all the darkness of the world could not fit into your little soul. _

The first morning of autumn, everything came alive again. Something was different about these colors, though. They were bright and loud and sparkling, but they did not make her sorry to step on the grass or want to sit on her roof and stare for hours at the glorious sky.

That was okay, for a while. She preferred the inner dullness to the outer gray, because at least then it _seemed_ like Eden. She preferred to pretend that she glowed along with the rest of the world, instead of recognizing that she was the singular failure in an otherwise structurally perfect creation.

She kept fading, becoming more and more imperfect until the world that had welcomed her at first didn't feel like home anymore. She wore her skirt shorter, and her shirt tighter, and her hair silkier and smoother to make up for the muted air around her. Her father sent her a letter with a picture in it; her mother. _She was the most vibrant person I had ever met,_ he wrote. _You look just like her._

She looked at the photograph. Her mother was smiling – the same blonde hair, the same eyes, the same uniform. She was laughing, and she was shining like the moon. _Wow, you look beautiful in that photo,_ the girl beside her said, pointing at the photo. _You really … _glow_, you know? Wish _I_ did that when _I_ smiled._

Luna looked up from her mother, startled. She looked down at her hands, at her skirt, and into her soul. It was black, and it was frightening, but there were patches of sunlight everywhere, fighting and sometimes even winning. The darkness exploded from within her and spread out into the world, dripping onto trees and into the grass and the dirt and the lava that burned beneath. And it _was _grayer, the colors and the scenery around her, but somehow more real and perfect than it had been before. She felt suddenly guilty for sitting beneath a ceiling when the sky was stretched above her. She wanted to sit in her window and stare up at the stars all night.

She smiled, turning to the girl who had spoken. _You do. _


End file.
